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Thursday, 6 October 2016

Complexity
Science is more important than ever. Even though there is now big data about
everything in the world, I don’t believe that we don’t need science any longer,
in contrast to what Chris Anderson has claimed in The End of Theory: the data
deluge makes the scientific method obsolete (Wired Magazine 16(7), 2008). He
basically suggested that if you just had enough data, the truth would reveal
itself.

With the data
available to us, is it possible to know everything and to build a crystal ball
that allows us to see everything that is going on in the world in real time? In
fact, such projects are under way, built by the military and research centers
around the world. Stephen Wolfram has claimed that “Humans are more predictable
than Elementary Particles”. And it seems that CERN has actually built such a
prediction machine that uses artificial intelligence to learn patterns in the
data of human social behavior.

But these are
not just research projects, because "knowledge is power". So they are
political projects, too. This raises the question if so much data will enable
the ruling of a wise king or a benevolent dictator. Could we optimize the
world? Could society be run like a giant machine?

There are
companies that seem to be working on such concepts, such as IBM and Google.
They aim at reprogramming our society and building an operating system for it
that would guide our decision making, thinking, and behavior with personalized
information.

This kind of
technology has also become interesting for politics. We are heading towards
remote control of people. This could be a powerful approach: Google could
manipulate billions of people on our planet. It is, therefore, worrying is that
people like Larry Page said that there are a lot of things he likes to do but unfortunately
he cannot, because it is illegal.

Our society is
at a cross road. No question, we will live in a data based society – but what
kind of society will it be? Feudalism 2.0, Facism 2.0, or Communism 2.0?

It is concerning
that there are voices claiming that democracy is an outdated technology. We see
that democracy is in trouble in some countries such as Poland, Turkey, and
France. We might easily loose what we have built over hundreds of years –
freedom, human dignity, fairness and justice, pluralism, democracy,
participation, social norms and culture, security and peace, and many jobs.

It is time to
say Stop. The magic formula "more data = more knowledge = more power =
more success" does not work in many cases. Correlation does not equal
causation.

There is also a
technical reason for this: even though processing power increases
exponentially, data volume increases even faster – the fraction of data we can
process is going down over time. Moreover, as we go on networking the world,
systemic complexity is growing even faster, which implies a loss of top-down
control and a need of distributed control.

We need to build
a digital democracy, which we may call "democracy 2.0". We need to
learn how to bring great ideas and the knowledge of many people and artificial
intelligence systems together. For this, we need to build online deliberation
platforms.

It is not the
best individual solution that wins, but diversity: the combination of many
solutions creates collective intelligence. Being confronted with so many
problems in the 21st century, such as financial, economic and spending crisis,
massive unemployment, responses of decision-makers have become ever more
desperate.

Our main problem
is the lack of sustainability. We are overusing the resources of the world, in
particular nitrogen and phosphors, but also water – thus creating massive
problems.

We need a new
kind of economic system, capitalism 2.0, which is liberal, democratic,
participatory, social and ecological. This can now be built by combining the
Internet of Things, block chain technology and complexity science. To build a
circular economy, we need a system that can measure, value and trade
externalities – external effects of interactions between people, companies and
the environment.

We have started
to build such a system called "Nervousnet": a planetary nervous
system based on Internet of Things technology run by the citizens. It is using
smartphones as sensors to measure the environment. To be able to trust the
system, informational self-determination is taken seriously.

It also becomes
possible now to map resources and who uses them with an app called
Swarmpulse.net. But we need to go a step further. It is necessary to create a
multi-dimensional incentive and reward system: "finance 4.0" or "social-ecological
finance" that allows us to create feedback loops in the system in order to
support favorable kinds of self-organization.

This system can
now be built. BitCoin has shown that it is possible to create money in a bottom
up way. By measuring externalities of different kinds, people would create
different kinds of money (and earn money), and this money would eventually rise
to the top, thereby benefitting everyone.

This would
enable us to turn the digital dessert that Europe currently is into a digital
rainforest with digital opportunities for everyone, where interoperability
would allow to combine existing products and services in order to create new
products and services, which unleashes combinatorial innovation.

It is time to
build this open and participatory information, innovation, production, and
service ecosystem. Let’s do this together.

Short Bio:

Dirk Helbing is
Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich and member of the
German Academy of Sciences "Leopoldina". Helbing is member of the
Global Brain Institute and the International Centre for Earth Simulation. He
heads the futurict.eu and nervousnet.info initiatives, which want to open up
the opportunities of Big Data and the Internet of Things for everyone, and
leads the PhD program "Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible
Digital Future" at TU Delft.

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The activities leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 284709 - project 'FuturICT', a Coordination and Support Action in the Information and Communication Technologies activity area